


And And And

by boxoftheskyking



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Angst, But there is love, F/F, F/M, Ghosts, Grief, Love, M/M, Multi, No one is ever happy, Oedipal Issues, Underage Sex, awkward and questionable sexual content, lots of warnings, unresolved everthing
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-03-12
Updated: 2013-03-12
Packaged: 2017-12-05 01:59:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 4
Words: 6,364
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/717555
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/boxoftheskyking/pseuds/boxoftheskyking
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Melissa loves Anna loves Stiles loves Scott loves Melissa loves Stiles loves Melissa loves Scott loves Anna.</p>
<p>A complicated, messy, sometimes dreamy, sometimes ghostly, sometimes brutal, sometimes glorious, sometimes true experiment on the nature of love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [neenya](https://archiveofourown.org/users/neenya/gifts).



> This is based upon a chapter in "Summertime," which is another fic of mine that maybe you might like. After that chapter happened (a modified version appears in Chapter 2 of this story), the incomparable Niña (nininghasfeelings) pushed and poked and did her thing and then a story was born. That sounds a lot more suggestive than I meant it to. Sorry.
> 
> Anyway, it's not nice or clear, and it is an experiment in People And Their Shit, but I hope it's interesting to watch.

“He doesn’t love you, you know. Either of you.”

\---

He taps his fingers against the keys, thinks, types, deletes. 

\---

"He doesn't love you."

It’s the last thing Anna says to her. She stands and leaves the room, and it’s the last thing she ever hears Anna say.

They’ve been arguing about him, which is something that’s been happening a lot lately. He used to come up in conversation, now and then, and Anna would go pinched around the lips and say things that were half-statements, but she’d always back off. She didn’t have steel in her bones, so she wouldn’t force anything. Since the hospital, though, she’s stopped beating around the bush and started making demands. Leave him. Go. Come home with me. Stay with me. Leave him. Grow up. Stop. Stop. Get a life.

And Melissa says, “Can we not talk about this now?”

And Anna leaves it, lets Melissa bring the talk back to what Anna should sing next time they go to do karaoke with the nurses. Where they should take the kids for fall break. Whether or not forbidding the boys from watching PG-13 movies will do any good, since everyone knows Stiles can download anything. Anna lets it go.

Except for the last day. The last day, she coughs and says, iron-voiced and quiet, “What other time do we have?” 

And Melissa says nothing, because there is nothing to say to that. What do you say to that? She can’t pretend she isn’t a medical professional, can’t pretend that she suddenly can’t read a chart. Can’t pretend that she’s not the kind of woman to look, to keep tabs on the changes, to memorize the doctor’s handwriting like it’s her own son’s. But she can’t pretend that she’s suddenly good at bad news, that she's smarter, that she's a better person, that she has any promises left to make.

So she says, “Anna, please don’t do this now.”

And Anna says, “He doesn’t love you, you know. Either of you.”

And Melissa stands, and she closes the door softly behind her, and she kisses the top of  Little Stiles’ head and she leaves with her neck straight, looking straight ahead. And she gets the call at three in the morning and she isn’t surprised at all. 

Grief isn’t a big sudden rockslide. It’s more like filling a bucket. Holding a yoke over her shoulders, like those old maidens in fairytales, and feeling the buckets fill with running water. Slow weight. There’s no period where suddenly it’s heavy. It’s always getting heavier. It never wasn’t heavy. There was no time without grief. There was no time with straight necks and strong backs. There was never anything but liquid weight, bowing her shoulders.

Scott is too young to understand. Mostly. Small mercies.

——-

The last time Scott sees Anna, Stiles is curled up in the chair by her bed, fast asleep. He has a book in his lap, so he’s probably been reading to her. He’s not very good at reading aloud. Scott knows it. He tends to skip words, read them in his head instead of out loud. Or he’ll just stop, when his brain takes a hairpin turn or decides it needs to analyze the last paragraph a little more, and Scott and Anna will just have to sit in silence and wait for him to catch back up. They don’t call him out on it, though. The teachers do, but Scott and Anna don’t. Scott looks over at Anna and she’s grinning at him with exasperated fondness, perfectly content to sit and watch him puzzle something out. Scott takes his cues from her; she’s never steered him wrong. He thinks maybe it makes him love Stiles more, learning to watch him like Anna watches him. He’s not sure, yet, if that makes sense. They’re just unformed, nebulous little thoughts. He’s twelve; what can he possibly articulate about love?

The last time he sees her, Stiles is asleep and she’s watching him, fingers moving on the scratchy hospital blanket like she’s brushing them over his hair. Scott sits down quietly and puts two containers of soup on her tray.

“Hey, kid,” she whispers, looking at the food in askance.

“The chilli’s for me,” he whispers back. “I know you can’t eat anything ‘cause of your stomach, so I got you that weird minestrone stuff that smells a lot better than it actually tastes. I don’t think it’s actually minestrone. I didn’t ask.”

“Thanks.”

He opens both containers and pushes hers towards her. She closes her eyes and inhales, smiling.

“How can it smell so good and taste so bad?” she asks.

Scott giggles. “I don’t know, but the last time Stiles asked Darlene he just about got killed with a ladle.” 

“But you pulled him out of the way.”

“Yeah.”

“Good. You’ve gotta keep doing that, you know.”

Scott doesn’t say anything. He nods and eats his soup. Nobody’s talked about it outright, not to him, anyway. He doesn’t know what to say when people look at him like he’s a grown-up, so he just looks down. Some people think he’s not so smart, because he’d rather just shrug than say the wrong thing.

He finishes his soup and looks up at her. She’s smiling at him, sleepy-eyed. “I gotta go.”

“Yeah.”

“How do you feel?”

“I feel a lot better.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah." She looks at him softly, yawns a little.  "You’re something else, kid.”

He folds in half and kisses her shoulder, quick and light, before darting to the door.

“G’night, Stiles,” he whispers as he closes it. 

Later, after the funeral, he wishes he’d said “Anna,” too. “G’night, Stiles and Anna.” He says it to himself every night for the next year.

——-

He taps his fingers against the keys.

The thing is, Scott thinks, if Anna were still alive, this would be a lot weirder. Emailing your best friend to tell him that you dream about his mom is weird. But telling him that you dream about his mom’s ghost is okay. He thinks. It seems okay. It’s weird, but not sketchy-weird. It’s cosmic-weird.

That’s not a thing, is it? It’s probably weird. Stiles had midterms. Scott deletes the email without sending it. 


	2. Chapter 2

There is a chilly breeze across Scott’s face and he wakes up on his back in the night-wet grass. He sits up and looks around, startled, but he’s alone. 

The full moon is obscured behind a row of trees, and the sky is starting to grey out, just barely, towards dawn. He is flung out on the ground between two young trees, a few steps away from the creek. He may still be partially shifted, but he doesn’t really care. He’s alone, but not, with the shared heartbeats of the others humming under his fingertips. That’s where he feels them, at his extremities. Like they’re an extension of himself, bits of him that continue beyond his skin. He drops back down against the grass and smiles up at the clouded over night. He might start drifting.

Something shakes his foot.

“Mom?” he says, the immediately wonders why. He is shirtless in the middle of the woods, alone. His mother is nowhere near, but the feeling is.

“What did I tell you about calling me that? Melissa’s going to get jealous.”

“It was an accident.” It slips out of his mouth, before the confusion, because he’s pretty sure he isn’t awake. She’s sitting at his feet, facing towards the creek.

“Anna?”

Her head tips to one side, then the other, rolling out her neck. She worked at a desk all day, so her shoulders were alway tight.

“Are you okay, Scott?”

He pulls himself up to sitting, folding his legs self-consciously, crossing his arms across his knees. It doesn’t seem to matter, as she doesn’t look at him.

“What?”

“High School, right? Jesus, you look old. You haven’t graduated yet, have you?”

She’s facing away from him, but her voice perfectly clear, as if she were speaking directly into his ear.

“Am I dreaming?”

She shrugs. “That’s your business.”

No one says anything for a long minute. She tips her head and lets the breeze play at her short hair. She must be real, then, Scott thinks. If the wind moves around her, if it doesn’t just go through her, she must be here. He should get Stiles, he should, but he’s afraid to move.

He opens his mouth to ask something— _What do you mean I look old, Why won’t you look at me, Where have you been, Do you visit Stiles, Why hasn’t he told me, Should I tell him, What happens after after after_ —but the words trip over themselves on the edge of his lips, and “I really miss you” falls out and just sits there on the ground, looking at him.

She turns her head a fraction, he can see the edge of her jaw. It looks like his best friend’s face, from this angle. It’s smiling. 

“I miss you, too.”

He is relieved, tension sliding down his neck. If this is a dream, it isn’t a bad one.

“What are you doing out in the middle of the woods in the middle of the night?” she asks. He looks around. They are surrounded by a ring of purple flowers, wolfsbane, that he doesn’t remember seeing. He wouldn’t fall asleep in a ring of wolfsbane, would he?

“I’m a werewolf,” he says simply. She doesn’t seem to surprised.

“That’s new.”

He can’t help laughing, looking up into the dark leaves above him. He doesn’t remember her being funny. He remembers how she used to make his mom laugh, so hard that she’d cry, slamming her palm down on the table and gasping  _“Oh my God, Anna, stop! I’m actually going to die!”_  He was too little to get it, though, the joke and her dry twist of a half-smile. His best friend’s smile, now. She left it to him.

“Yeah. Stuff’s been happening. I was in love, too. I might be in love. I don’t know, it’s complicated. There was a girl.”

“Was she nice?”

“Mostly.”

She nods, doesn’t ask anymore. The silence grows. He waits for her to say something. Ghosts usually come back with a reason, don’t they? He’s heard enough campfire stories. Listened to his best friend reenacting most of Hamlet to help him study for the English final. But she doesn’t seem to have anything to say. She’s just sitting comfortably within the ring of wolfsbane, smelling the air.

He can’t smell her. He realizes it suddenly and it’s like a claw in his gut. It’s worse than a punch, it has talons, it’s a garden trowel hooking under his ribs and tugging. She isn’t real.

“Do you watch us?”

She doesn’t respond.

“Stiles? Do you see  him, ever? He doesn’t talk to me so much anymore. I don’t know what to do for him. I don’t know what he needs anymore.”

“Does it matter?” It sounds like her, but it doesn’t, and the claws tug harder.

“I love him,” he says finally. She nods like that’s an answer. “It’s like everything else changes. And he’s changing, too, but it’s not the same. I don’t feel like I’m losing him. Everything else, it’s like—” he picks a handful of grass and spins it between his fingertips, watching it fall. She nods, though she can’t see him.

“He’s your constant.”

“Yeah.”

“That’s good.”

——-

He writes another email. 

_One time in high school I dreamt I saw your mom on the full moon night._

He taps the keys with his fingertips, not hard enough to type, just listening to the click.

_She said hi._

He erases it. She never did.

_Sorry I didn’t tell you. It happened three times and then you moved away and it stopped. But I dream about her sometimes._

He deletes the whole thing. Gets up for a drink of water. Stares at the screen.

_Hey buddy. Long time no see! You’re coming home for spring break, right? We should start planning. Miss you._

He hits send. It doesn’t really say anything, but it’ll do.

——

They’re quiet again, listening to the water. He imagines that she’s listening to the water, anyway. He wonders if there’s water where she came from. He doesn’t ask, though. It feels rude. Not really rude, but not allowed. Against the rules. And he doesn’t know if he wants her to answer.

“Am I?” he asks, quietly. He can’t really hear himself, but she does. It’s a dream. Of course she does.

“For him, you mean?”

“Yeah.”

“You always were.”

“Good. Did you—” he shifts a bit. “Did you have one? Do you have one?”

She gives a little laugh. He can’t really hear it and he can’t see her face, but he feels it. Her laughing. “Yes, I do. My Melissa. Melissa  _mia._ ”

“I remember! You used to call her that all the time and she’d smack you with a spatula.”

“That was one time!”

“That was definitely more than one time. She never learned to use her words—”

“Hey, she’s  _your_  mother!”

He snorts, and she laughs at him. “She was your constant?”

“It’s not like— You say it like it’s some magical Thing. It’s not; that’s just what I called her. I was hers and she was mine. Everyone has one. Most people just don’t notice.”

“You were married, though. You got married.” He wants to take it back as soon as he says it, but she doesn’t seem mad. She leans back on her elbows, closer to him but still not turning. 

“I was in love. You can do that, you know. Fall in love.”

“But—”

“It’s not the same thing. It’s not— I was in love because I  _wanted._  It’s a scraping wanting feeling, like I could have crawled inside his skin and it wouldn’t have been enough. With Melissa, it was just having. I always knew she was there, and I didn’t need anything else.  They don’t cancel each other out; it doesn’t have to be difficult. She was in love, too. For a bit.”

He grunts. He won’t waste this dream on that memory. 

“Do you see the difference?” 

“I don’t know,” he says slowly. “I think I— I think maybe I want— I don’t know. I don’t know how I … feel. I guess.”

She shrugs. That used to drive his best friend crazy. The more he’d get worked up about something, some confession or secret or idea, the more casual she’d act. 

“You’ll figure it out. He’ll be there if you do. He’ll be there if you don’t.”

“Yeah. So,” he says after a second, leaning forward. “You don’t think my mom’s pretty, or what?”

“What?” she squeaks. She always gets a little squeak in her voice when she’s surprised.

“You just said you never wanted my mom,” he teases. “She’s not pretty enough for you, or what?”

She bursts out laughing and turns around. He stops breathing. She looks the same, exactly the same and she’s laughing and she’s looking at him and he doesn’t blink. He won’t ever blink again. And when did she get young? She was so young. He’d never really thought of her like that. Someday soon he’ll be older than her. Most of his life he’ll be older than her.

“Your mom is the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen.”

“Yeah” he breathes, forgetting the joke entirely, because he sees those exact eyes every day of his life. He just agrees. She is, she is, the prettiest. The claws twist in his ribs, he feels bone scrape. She doesn’t look away, but  _she can’t be real._

“Give her my love.” She wrinkles her nose. “That sounds so cold, like I’m lending her a book or something. Tell her I love her.”

“And Stiles, too? His dad?”

She smiles at him softly. “They know.”

There is a chilly breeze across Scott’s face and he wakes up on his back in the morning-wet grass. He sits up  and looks around, but he’s alone. Alone in the middle of a ring of wolfsbane. A few clumps have been pulled out, breaking the circle. There’s no one there.

He pulls out his phone, glad that it survived another full moon. He’s calling his best friend before he’s even decided what to say. 

“This is Stiles’ phone,” the voice sounds tinny, tired. “I’m not answering it, for whatever reason. If you’re calling with a request, or a favor, or a summons of any kind, just assume the answer is ‘No’ and get on with your life.”

Scott hangs up before the beep. He doesn’t really know what to say, but he feels better. 

He steps through the break and heads home.

“Good night?” his mom asks, looking up from the kitchen table as he comes in the back door.

“You’re up early.”

“Couldn’t sleep. Bring home any game for me to gut? Maybe a deer head for the wall?”

“Sorry.” 

He drops into the chair next to her and she rises to pick leaves out of his hair.

“You should put a shirt on. It’s getting cold.” 

He shrugs. “I had a dream. Last night, I mean.”

“A wolf dream?”

He rolls his eyes but leans into her hand on the top of his head. “No. A people dream.”

“Mmm?”

“I—” He looks down at his hands, at the sun coming in and reflecting off the clean tabletop. She cleans when she can’t sleep sometimes. “Anna says hi. Anna says she loves you.”

The hand in his hair stills. He squeezes his eyes shut.  _She’s either going to leave and stay in her room all morning, or—_

She sticks her nose into his hair, rubs her forehead on the top of his head. Her voice is almost steady when she says “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Good dream, then.”

He nods, leaning against her stomach. “The best.”

———-

The dreams he has after high school are mostly warped memories. Sometimes he’s young and she’s smiling down at him from the kitchen table, his mom’s hand on the back of her neck. Sometimes she’s dying behind a glass window and he can’t break through, and Stiles is on the other side, begging for help, holding her in his arms and she shakes and shudders. When she stills, Stiles looks Scott dead in the eye and just stares, accusing. Scott doesn’t read anything into those dreams. He thinks they’re pretty obvious.

Sometimes, though, he dreams of being older, of walking through the grocery store or down in the park and running into Anna, same as she was before she got sick. He's as old as her, suddenly, or she as young as him. He’s taller than her, broader, and sometimes Stiles is with him, long and lean beside him. Anna’s forehead brushes his chin. 

Those dreams never last very long, and he rarely remembers them.

 

 


	3. Chapter 3

Melissa McCall signs her name with too many angles. The first and last names don’t match, like they’re written by two different people. She wears McCall like a cross most of the time, except those moments when Scott falls asleep on the couch with is mouth half open, or when he surprises her on break because he’s bored, or when he says that he actually likes playing with her hair and she falls asleep with her head on his knee because somehow he grew up and she didn’t know it was happening. Or he’ll snort Orange Crush out his nose every time she swears, because apparently being a legal adult does not make you mature enough to handle your mother dropping f-bombs left and right.

If she stops to think about it, that’s a lot of exceptions. She does all right, all things considered. What’s in a name, right? A word is just a group of sounds, that one day people decided should mean something. Easy enough to change.

\---

Stiles’ phone buzzes. Just once, so it’s a text, not a call. She doesn’t want to move her head from his bare shoulder, or open her eyes, but he reaches over to the nightstand and she does both. 

“Scott,” he says simply.

“Anybody dead?” Her voice is scratchy. Old.

“Doesn’t look like it. What do I tell him?” 

This would all be so much easier if he would stop asking her what to do. As if she knows.

“Do you have to tell him anything?”

He looks at her with deep eyes, whirlpool eyes, sudden dropoff undertow eyes. Says nothing. Puts the phone back. He looks up at the ceiling and bites his lip, hard.

She should apologize and leave and cover her face when she goes out in public. That is the obvious answer. That is what comes next. 

But she doesn’t. She slides a hand down his chest, tracing from the side of his neck to the curve of his ribs, and he just melts. He turns and sinks into her like a melting ice cube and she soaks him in like dry ground.

_It’s okay,_  she tells herself.  _I’ll drown myself in the river later._

But, of course, later is full of frantic phone calls and children who need to be stitched back together, and that takes up time. It’s funny, they aren’t children anymore, technically. She only thinks of them as children when they’re bleeding. It’s like a switch flips in her head as soon as skin breaks. Well, Scott’s another matter. Scott’s another matter entirely. Of course he is. He’s not _a_  child, he’s her child.

Every time she sees Stiles, from then on, she tells herself:  _It’s okay, I’ll drown myself in the river later._

She never does get around to it.

———

Derek is not involved. He does not want to be involved. He knows there is something happening, and it has more corners than he is entirely comfortable with, and he is very much not involved. 

Until now, apparently, because he’s been casually threatening Stiles as usual and something just snapped. It’s a thing they do. He kind of likes it. Like jokes, but without the awkward laughing (how long do I laugh, are you laughing too, do I laugh if I made the joke, is just smiling okay?) part. He assumes Stiles likes it, because he always answers with a half-grin and an exaggerated eye-roll, and some snippy response about Derek’s murder-method-of-the-day.

Not today, though. The taste in the air is off today, and he doesn't pick up on it until too late. He's really not good at seeing things coming; things always catch him off guard. He says something stupid like “Or I’ll smash your head open on that tree over there,” and Stiles spins around with wet eyes and screams,” Why do you keep saying you’re going to kill me if you never fucking do it? Huh? Just talk, aren’t you? You’re all talk. Just leave it. Don’t get my fucking hopes up if you’re just gonna—”

And he stops talking and chokes on a mouthful of spit. He starts to run away, but gives up after three steps, bending at the waist and trying to gouge out his eyes with the heels of his hands. It won’t work, won’t tear them out, scientifically impossible. (He’s not the one to pick out his eyes, anyway. He doesn’t know who the hell he’s supposed to be in this story, he's never read this story before.)

Derek is still staring, shocked into freezing. He takes a step forward and unsnaps his jaw. 

“What— What’s going on, Stiles? You can tell me what’s going on. I promise. I promise I can help—”

And Stiles just busts out laughing and leaves him in the middle of the woods. It’s not normal laughter, it’s angry and ripped-up, and that’s what makes Derek stay put. That, more than anything. It’s such an awful sound, worse than a record scratch or claws on a chalkboard. If Stiles had pulled that laugh out back when he was in high school, Derek would have left him alone from day one.

He is not involved. He’s not. He won’t be. He can’t be. It’s not his problem, not his business. It doesn’t have anything to do with him. Most things don’t.

———-

It starts a long time before it starts, if that makes any sense. It probably doesn’t, which would fit nicely with the general theme of the thing.

It starts years—actual years, not metaphorical years like it-was-a-long-time-and-felt-like-years—before any physical contact happened. There was physical contact, of course. Hugs and slaps upside the head and sometimes a twisted ear when he got overly mouthy. Normal stuff. But before sweat-and-mouths-and fingers-and-teeth kind of contact. That’s a result. A side effect, maybe. Not that Stiles would let it go, however twisted and burned-up it makes him feel. He’s not going to be the one to walk away.

It starts, as far as he’s concerned, one Saturday afternoon when he’s sitting at the McCall’s kitchen table, waiting for Scott to get out of the shower. Nothing has even happened on the Scott front, at this point, so Scott in the shower is nothing particularly interesting.  

Melissa is across from him on her laptop, eyes flicking to the corner of the screen every minute or so. She probably should have left five minutes ago, but she doesn’t like to take off without at least shouting goodbye to Scott.

They’re having one of their weird one-sided-two-sided conversations. Scott doesn’t understand them, and neither does Stiles’ dad. They used to be normal, polite, you’re-my-friend’s-mom talks, but now they’ve settled into something distinctly Melissa-and-Stiles. Stiles talks about his day, his theories, and his analysis of Isaac’s puppy eyes. Melissa talks about Cheryl the intern, her ideas, and what she would really say to Scott’s English teacher if she didn’t think it would land her in prison. They both talk at the same time, rarely looking up at each other. Melissa pokes around online and Stiles traces diagrams in his chemistry textbook, an odd stereo mumble filling the kitchen. If Scott’s in the room, they talk like normal people, but without him there’s no need. Sentences follow an odd internal logic, bouncing between topics and replies and questions and elaboration. Sometimes an eye will catch an eye and someone will snort, understanding a joke from three minutes ago. 

If Scott walks into a conversation, he’ll listen for a moment and then clap his hands over his ears. It’s been worse for him since his hearing has improved. He’ll roll his eyes between them and bellow, “How do you hear each other? How do you hear yourselves think?”

And Melissa raises her eyebrows at him and says “Superior minds.” And then she wrinkles her nose at him like it’s a joke and he smiles back at her and Stiles feels like he’s sitting in the corner, even if he’s in the middle of the room. He knows it’s a joke, he’d never say anything bad about Scott’s mind. But he does like the idea of his mind and Melissa’s mind being different. Similar in their difference. 

The day it starts, they’re in the middle of talking, killing time, and she huffs out a laugh and he looks up and he catches her eyes mid-roll and it should just be silly but it’s not. It’s really, really not.

He suddenly understands all the imagery of hearts and arrows because it’s sudden and it stings and it comes out of nowhere and it’s terrifying and he has a slightly sinking feeling that it might end up killing him.

_Peripeteia,_  his brain says.  _Sudden reversal of circumstances. The ‘oh shit’ moment._

It doesn’t even fit, really. He got a shitty grade on that English paper and now he’s got a half-defined word bouncing around inside his head. 

She’s giving him a weird look, but a fond one. He grunts out, “Greek. Greek literature. I think,” and she snorts.

“English assignment?”

“I think maybe.” That’s not even a sentence. How did he form sentences, before. She has crinkles in the corners of her eyes and they are astonishing.

“Old dead white guys. Just refuse to do it. Say you’re morally opposed. You’ve got ideological beef. Tell them to get Louise Erdrich on the curriculum, then you’ll talk.”

He should make a quip about how she’s a bad influence or about how he knows she’s only name-dropping because she read a review in Rolling Stone or something, but he doesn’t. She doesn’t notice, because five minutes behind is now ten and the shower stops.

She shakes out her hair, tying it up with a glance at the clock in the way she does every day. She hollers a good-night to Scott and gives him a wink before heading out the door. He smiles goodbye and pretends he remembers how to breathe.

That’s how it starts.

Easy as breathing. Easy as forgetting how to breathe.


	4. Chapter 4

"Come here often?"

He starts up at her voice and casts his eyes around the sun-dappled clearing. The wolfsbane circle is there, intact. 

"It's daytime," he says stupidly. She looks at the river and laughs. 

"And here you are, skipping practice to take a nap in the middle of the woods."

"I thought maybe I'd see you again. But I wasn't sure. I thought you only came here at night."

She says nothing, but he can tell she's smiling. She does that when he comes too close to asking an actual question. No, that's not right. He can ask questions about the past and about colors and the sky and the weather, but nothing about where from or what or why.

"Stiles is probably going to play today, now that I'm not there. He's pretty good."

"So that's what this is about. Needed an excuse to sneak away so your friend can have the spotlight for once."

He blushes and looks down at his knees, slightly pissed off. "No. I came to see you. I always come to see you. It's not an accident, and it's not a coincidence. I only come here to see you."

She is quiet for a while, then scoot back towards him. He freezes, waiting for it, and she turns. He knows he'll only get a few seconds now. She looks at him and smiles at him and then she's gone, every time. 

"It's a nice place. You should come here other times, too. Watch the water. You'll miss it, when you move away."

"I'm not going anywhere." His mouth is dry. She smiles at him.

"You should," she says lightly, like a joke, like a giggle. 

He can't stop himself. He reaches out and touches her arm, just under the fluttering short sleeve of her shirt. She's warm, solid. 

"Anna, don't--"

He wakes on his back within the broken ring of wolfsbane.

She's so soft. That's the problem. Warm and soft and living, and the warmth stays on his palm as he stumbles home, hand held in front of him like it's frozen, or broken, like it's covered in radioactive material or made out of egg shells. It's so warm and soft he starts shaking.

He chases the feel of her around his room--his pillow, the edge of the mattress, as many varieties of fabric as he can find in the closet. Then himself, and the leaves out his window, and himself, and the edge of his desk, and himself and himself and himself and at some point he should stop, but he doesn't, and it's not perfect, but it's close enough, and at some point it just doesn't matter anymore.

When he comes down he slams his head against the wall over his bed, muttering to himself.  _Ghosts don't have skin. Ghosts don't have bones. Ghosts don't have skin._  It's not that he's ashamed. He should be ashamed. He should feel wrong about something, but he just feels strung-out. Frustrated. Teased.  _Ghosts don't have bones. Ghosts don't have skin. Ghosts don't have bones. Ghosts don't have skin. Ghosts don't have bones._

_  
_He showers and goes downstairs. He gets halfway through a grilled cheese sandwich before Melissa comes in, hair frizzing and shoulders bent. Not the exaggerated bend of a mother guilting a son into a neck rub. The real tightness of a bone-deep ache, one that he didn't start noticing until lately.

"Hey, Mom."

"How you doing, kiddo?"

He's quiet for a long time. Long enough for her to shake out her hair, dig around in the fridge, go upstairs to change. When she comes back, she's forgotten the question.

"Okay," he says deliberately.

"Okay what?"

"I'm doing okay."

"Oh. Right. What did you do today?"

"I saw Anna."

She stops on her way to the table, standing at his shoulder. 

"During the day?"

"Yeah. I thought-- I just wanted to see."

"So you're telling me you skipped lacrosse again."

He looks up at her, a little grin about his eyes. "We said we'd tell each other, remember?"

She presses her lips together and nods, smile gone. There's a silence in between them, thick like molasses, and obscured. It is like looking through molasses, dark and liquid, but not entirely opaque. Once he can see it, once he knows, it'll be like he never questioned in the first place.

"You'll tell me sometime," he says quietly, chasing a crumb around his plate with is thumb. "Whatever it is you're not telling me. You will, and it'll be okay."

"Yeah. I know. It'll be okay." She says it like she can't open her mouth enough to get the words out. He has to get that tightness out of her voice, so he blurts out:

"I touched her." 

He hadn't been sure if he was going to tell. 

"What?"

"Before she went. When she looked at me, I touched her arm. Just before I woke up."

"Did she--"

"She didn't stay."

She chews on her lip and he looks down at his feet. Taps them, awkward.

"What did it feel like?" She isn't quite whispering, just speaking like someone who hasn't spoken in a while. Like time has compressed, and a week has passed inside her throat.

"Warm. Soft. She was solid, Mom. I don't know how to--" He trails off, ducks his head. She's not a wolf, she can't smell it on him, but he can. He can't show her. But they promised. Tell each other everything. Everything about Anna is for sharing. 

"Try," she says, quiet and firm.

"Here," he takes her hand, doesn't look her in the eye. Tips his head to the side, looking at his knees. Sets her hand on the side of his neck, soft. Lets it go.

He lets his eyes slip closed as she holds still, not leaving the full weight of her hand on his skin. He doesn't remember her touching him so softly, not for years. She's rough with everything, slaps and hugs and jokes and goodnight kisses. He breathes through his nose, keeping it steady and not letting himself twitch.

She moves the tips of her fingers, just a tiny back-and-forth shift against the warmth of his skin. A little damp from sweat and the shower, catching the pads of her fingers before letting them slide. A swallow. A pulse. 

She breathes out loud, almost a hiss, but doesn't take her hand away. He squeezes his eyes shut, arches his neck farther. She moves her whole palm across, shoulder to jaw. He stays still.

\-------

He kisses Stiles on the bank. Anna's right, it's a nice place to come and sit, watch the water. After he does it he feels kind of funny, like it's something they meant to do ages ago but never got around to it.

Stiles looks cut up, kind of, eyes boring into Scott's like drillbits. 

"Yeah?" he says quietly. Just that, just "yeah?"

"Yeah," Scott says, and it's an exhale that leads to an inhale that leads to another kiss. They sink back on the grass and Scott tries to keep his eyes open. He lets them slip closed, though, keeps his hands on Stiles' shoulders so he doesn't forget where he is. Stiles keeps his fingers in Scotts hair, carding through it over and over and over until it sticks up like an experiment in static electricity. 

They doze after a while, one of those perfect afternoon naps, and Scott doesn't dream. 

\---

Derek corners her in the breakroom, which should probably surprise her. It doesn't.

"What are you doing?" he demands, leaving the question mark off entirely.

"Making coffee. Want some?"

"With Stiles. What are you doing with Stiles?"

She pauses for a second, coffee scoop suspended at an angle above the filter. It's not quite straight, so the grounds shake out in little fits and starts.

"What does it matter?"

"He's not happy."

"He tells you when he is and isn't happy? Good to know. How's the Masters in Social Work treating you?"

"God, you  _sound_  like him."

She snaps the basket into the coffee maker. "I sound like myself."

He folds his arms and plants his feet, staring at her. She leans against the counter and watches the coffee start to drip.

"He's with Scott now."

"I assume he is."

"You know that they're--"

"So why aren't you creeping around Scott? Making demands? Sticking your nose in--"

"Because Scott makes him happy."

"So?"

"You-- You make him want to die."

She's prepared for everything but that. She's prepared for an attack; she welcomes an attack. But that is a sledgehammer to the softest parts of her and she gasps at the ground, unable to help it. He hovers for a moment, thinking of something to say, then leaves her. 

The coffee finishes, and she waits for the last drips to stop before removing the pot and dumping it out into the sink. She doesn't even know why. She pours a bit of it over her hand, but it doesn't hurt the way it should.

She feels like a bruise.

  _It's okay. It's okay. You make him- It's okay, because you'll drown yourself in the river later_.

A light, singsong little voice in the hollow behind her ear:

_No, you won't._


End file.
